


Do What You Do, Say What You Say

by gala_apples



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Children, Domestic Fluff, F/F, First Meetings, Homophobia, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 04:24:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2095650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/pseuds/gala_apples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten things Melissa doesn't regret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do What You Do, Say What You Say

**Author's Note:**

> I had to use the tag names, but in this fic it's still Melissa Delgado and Claudia Augustyniak. They don't take the names of their close male friends, that would be random and weird. There's a lot about the timeline we don't know, but I tried my best to make everything make sense. (also there's a bit of a slam for the ending of QAF)
> 
> Written for day three of TWfemslash: rare pairing.

Melissa wants to strangle herself for picking French as an elective. Nowhere in her nursing degree does it say she has to, but given her big city ER dreams, knowing more languages than English and Spanish made sense at the time. It still makes sense, from a purely logical standpoint. Unfortunately logic and reality aren’t always friends. This course is impossible, and she’s going to fail, and be the shame of the family, and be forced to drop out and go live in a cave.

The only upside is a guy in her class. John Stilinski. 

She hasn’t talked directly to him yet, so someone might say that she doesn’t actually _know_ if he’s an upside. And maybe in some other class that would be true. But French 101 is a participant class. Every third minute Professor Delacour is telling them to share something then translate it. By now Melissa knows quite a bit about all her classmates, and John is one of them. 

Everything John says in English is funny, and she’d be willing to bet the same is true in French. Not that she can tell for sure. Seeing as the language is fucking impossible, but he speaks it nearly fluently already, so each Thursday she hears a little less of what he has to say. She’d like to though. Melissa is going to get in his study group if she has to push Bruce Livingstone down a flight of stairs.

***

Melissa hates frat parties. They’re one part stupid stunts, one part drinking, one part hooking up. As a lesbian almost nurse, she can’t help but reclassify this to one part ‘you’re going to end up in the ER with a concussion needing stitches’, one part ‘no seriously, stomach pumping in the ER’, one part boys and their penises. But John really wants her here with him because of some boy that’ll be attending, and so she goes.

The problem with being wingman is you’re stuck when the bird takes flight. Melissa has a choice. She can leave and walk all the way back to her dorm alone. Or she wait until John’s done in the bedroom or whatever nook or shadowed cranny he found with this ‘Rafe’ and get a ride.

Choice made, she wanders to the makeshift bar for the first time. There’s a man monitoring the keg, and a woman pouring shots across an uneven card table. Melissa likes hard liquor even less than beer but the woman is the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen in her life, and Melissa needs to hear her voice if she’s going to objectify her and masturbate to her later tonight.

“Can I get a vodka shot?”

The girl turns on the guy. “I freakin told you you should have gotten more than two bottles.” She twists back to face Melissa. “Idiot here-”

“Hey!”

“Out-bought rum to anything else like six to one.”

Melissa winces at the idea of rum. It’s what her dad nearly always smells of, and she hates it.

“Since we have to ration this for the rest of the night, I can give you a vodka shot or I can give you a kiss.”

Holy shit. That is nowhere even close to an equal trade, and the outcome isn’t even close to a question. Melissa leans over the table, palm in a puddle of something, and thanks fate being sober means she’ll remember every second of the dark haired girl’s lips on hers. Hell, maybe she’ll even ask her name.

***

“Wait, stop. Just to double check...sex before a second date is okay with you?”

Melissa laughs, knowing Claudia can feel every inch of it as her chest heaves. “I think my dragging you to the bathroom of an art gallery indicates yes.”

“There’s this thing called Stendhal Syndrome. It makes people lose their minds in art galleries. I just needed to give you a chance to clear your head.”

“Your concern is downright gentlemanly. But now I’m going to curl my leg around your hip and you’re going to touch me, okay?”

***

Most families meet up at Thanksgiving. Not the Augustyniaks. Their day of gathering and feasting is Halloween. Pulling into Higgins Bay, Melissa can see why. The house is in a far better neighbourhood than Claudia had described, or maybe it’s her fault for assuming middle class. Where it’s different than every other mansion is the sweeping lawn covered in Halloween decorations. From tombstones and coffins half protruding from the ground to glowing eyes in the bushes to the trees covered in cobwebbing, it’s Halloween on steroids. Or, probably more accurately, Halloween without a budget.

Melissa gets to make her first impression of Claudia’s parents about five seconds after they step through the oversized stain glass door. And it’s: this is where Claudia gets her belief in the supernatural from. Mr Augustyniak is wearing a purple business shirt. Tame enough for work standards, except if you look a little closer, his tie isn’t polkadotted, those are tiny black cats. Mrs Augustyniak is far less subtle in a souvenir shirt of a ghost hunting tour in Belfast.

“Melissa! I’ve heard so much about you, I’m so glad to meet you. Do you have a costume packed?”

“Claudia said you’d rue the day I met her if I didn’t.”

Mr Augustyniak flaps his hand. Melissa wouldn’t be surprised if the first words out of his mouth are ‘pish posh’, but instead she gets “such an exaggerator, our daughter.”

“Underexaggeration,” Claudia shoots back, not worried in the least about talking back to him. Melissa’s suddenly far less concerned about spending the weekend here.

***

This is stupid, and Claudia is going to laugh at her. She’s not even going to give the ring a second look, she’s just going to laugh. There’s a difference between Claud being a weirdo with an odd favourite holiday and wanting to celebrate it intensely, and Melissa is on the wrong side of that divide. God, why did Rafe tell her she was doing the right thing? He’s applying for the FBI, he should be smarter than this.

“You okay, Lis? It sorta sounds like you’re hyperventilating. Is the pollen too much? We could go?”

“No. I want to stay here with you. That’s sort of the point. I want to be everywhere with you.” Melissa pulls the big box out of her purse. “Will you marry me, so we can always be here, together?”

Claudia bursts into tears and Melissa’s heart stops. Should she at least be happy Claudia’s finding it so difficult to say no? Fucking Rafe, encouraging her madness. As soon as she’s safe to drive without plowing into a lamppost, she’s going directly to John and Rafe’s to punch Rafe in the face.

Then Claudia dives her hands into the blanket of fallen leaves and throws huge handfuls at Melissa before leaping sideways and feeling her up. “Where’s that ring? Lemme at it!”

Melissa laughs a little hysterically as Claudia grabs at her ribs, a known ticklish spot. Maybe proposing in the forest on Arbour day _was_ a good idea.

***

“I just don’t understand why you’re spending so much money on this party.”

“It’s not a party, it’s a wedding.” Melissa’s not even going to touch the rest of the comment. Her dress is on, her makeup is on, the hall is set, staff are hustling to make dinner in the kitchen. If there was a time to complain about budgeting, it’s far over.

“You know it’s not. This has no legal standing, and it’s nothing in the eyes of God.”

“I don’t care about the law. I’m doing this.”

“But why? Think about it. Really think.” Mom puts a hand on Melissa’s shoulder, bare because she keeps changing her mind about the gorgeous beaded shawl she purchased rather than a veil. “This is your last chance. Why? Is it to help her? She’s Polish, right? Does she need a green card?”

“Her name is Claudia. My soon-to-be-wife’s name is Claudia and the sooner you stop referring to her in pronouns and start using her name like a human being, the better.”

“I’m not saying that she’s not. I’m saying that you’re not too old to find a man to love and cherish you. You don’t need to be a spinster with her.”

Melissa could scream until she’s blue in the face -thus fulfilling one component of the wedding articles tradition- but Mom will never hear what she’s saying. “This is my wedding. I’ve told you all along that I want you to be here. Like a mother should. But honestly if you’re only here to be disrespectful you can go. I need Claudia’s love more than I need yours.”

Her mom steps from the room. Melissa’s not sure what that means, besides she’ll need to find someone else to lace up the back of her dress. She wishes she could ask John, but he’s in boot camp, and he made them promise to not put off the wedding.

***

“We want your sperm.”

“Excuse me?” Rafe blurts. His shock manifests physically, with a jolt hard enough to make some of his beer slop down the side of his glass.

“Can you explain?” John asks.

Claudia crinkles her face. “I don’t know how much simpler it could be, but you know when you’re banging Rafe and stuff comes out your dick? We want some of that. In a cup.”

“I know what sperm is, thanks. We meant more like why.”

“Melissa and I want to be mothers. One child for the both of us, raised like twins. We’ve been talking about it for ages.”

John nods, but his face is still in military interrogation mode. “From a practical viewpoint, won’t that be difficult?”

“With my inheritance we can afford about two years off, and Melissa has mat leave in her benefits.”

“Can we have partial custody?” Rafe bursts.

Melissa reaches her for cranberry juice. Evidently this is going to be a longer conversation than she thought.

***

“Thus concludes the bloodiest shift ever.”

James elbows Alanna softly. “Don’t say that. You’ll jinx us.”

“Sorry,” Alanna answers, legitimately contrite. Anyone who doesn’t believe in jinxes and curses and full moons doesn’t work in the emergency field.

“Man, I can’t wait to get home to my massage chair.”

“I can’t wait to get to my tub. An entire bottle of bubbles will be lost in the coming hours, I swear.”

Melissa knows they’re looking at her expectantly. She could say something random. Another lie of omission in her silo high stack of them. Sometimes she thinks she has it worse than John. He’s fucked if someone finds out, which means his conscious is clear about not telling. Melissa, however, just feels like a coward every day, no matter what kind of gang member she’s just cowed or raging parent she’s gotten to sit down.

“I can’t wait to get home to my wife.”

Time seems to stretch, pull and shine at the edges. The back part of Melissa’s brain, the part that has learned to triage every situation, just like John has learned how to visually clear a room and Rafe has learned how to profile any person, and blissfully Claudia doesn’t have to do any such dark thing- that part whirrs into being. If this is going to be a shitshow, she needs to figure out what kinds of anti-discrimination rights she has when it comes to hospital policy.

Then James breaks the silence. “I hope she’s a foot massager. You deserve it, after today.”

Huh. She should probably still figure out her rights though.

***

Melissa watches her wife watch inanimate objects. Mostly the door, and the window, but also the clock and the cordless phone on the side table. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it all out. Phone’s in case Rafe and John call with an emergency. Clock’s to figure out how long Scott and Przemyslaw have been gone. The door is because Claudia is obviously extremely thrown off by having the porch light off and the actual door closed. And the window is because all of this is making her antsy enough to want to dive out it and sprint down the child filled street.

“It’s literally driving you insane to not hand out candy to trick or treaters, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what’s worse, denying trick or treaters or not being out there with the boys.” Claudia untwists the ends of a Tootsie Roll but doesn’t pop it into her mouth. “I know we agreed weeks ago; we volunteer for costume day at school, John and Rafe take them out, everyone shares pictures, the candy is split between houses. It’s just a lot more okay in theory than in practice, I guess.”

“ _Do_ you want to distract yourself with tiny begging children?”

“No, no. We agreed,” Claudia reminds her, like she’s forgotten. “The boys with the men this year, and me and you have wild costumed marathon length sex in the rare privacy.”

But Claudia doesn’t seem particularly receptive to Sexy Angel and Sexy Farmgirl right now. In fact, she’s looked towards the phone twice more since Melissa muted the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode. So Melissa decides to throw the deal to the wind. 

“Come on, stand up.” She slaps her wife’s bare thigh. “You have five minutes to find something that covers your whole asscheek, then we’re gonna go to their condo and jog around the block until we find them. The men will understand us crashing, it’s not like they’ve never before. And we’ll renegotiate it like Christmas next year.”

***

Melissa’s been thinking it a while, but tonight is the night she says it. To the popcorn ceiling, not to Claudia, she’s not quite ready to look her in the eye, even in the dim moonlight, but it still counts. “We should move.”

The bed creaks as Claudia rolls onto her side. “Explain.”

“I’m tired of so many gunshot wounds. You know almost my entire shift is just gunshot wounds?”

“Have you thought about transferring? If you’re not in the ER...”

“Claude, it’s not just about me. With John ousted-”

“Yeah. Fucking DADT. Damn Clinton. Damn Bush. And god _damn_ his so called friends.”

“Everything here reminds him of his friends turning on him. He hasn’t drunk outside the house in weeks.” It doesn’t concern Melissa enough to confront him, at least not yet, but she does like it more when the cost of mixed drinks in a bar is prohibitive to John and Rafe going overboard.

Claudia’s silent for long that Melissa thinks that’s it, discussion over, proposal summarily rejected. Then Claudia reaches for her hand under the blanket. “This is kinda fast for me, but it looks like you’ve been thinking about it for awhile. Do you have somewhere in mind?”

“Beacon Hills. It’s still in California, close enough that Rafe could commute to the Sacramento office. There are job postings for law enforcement and nursing. And I’m sure somewhere needs retail help. Stores are pretty universal.” 

“And you think it’d be okay for the boys? And us?”

“Nothing special. But nothing bad that I can find either. And the mayor is queer. The elected mayor, so enough people at least don’t care, even if there’s not enough out and proud for a parade.” And hey, a big city pride parade gives them an excuse to drive in for a weekend, just like they’ll have to for holidays with families, and no doubt for Disneyland at some point.

“Honestly, you’ve got me half sold. But we need to talk to Rafe and John. There’s no way we can just up and leave. We’re not Melanie and Lindsay.”

That much Melissa can agree with. Her wife and her sons are her everything, but she loves John and she loves Rafe, and her sons love their dads. Whether they move or not, whatever life ends up looking like, it’ll be the six of them.


End file.
